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3“She was such a sweet, lovely person,”
Leffel remembers. “I just loved her face.
She had this wistful quality about her, and
her features always struck me, so I asked
her to sit with me and I did that little
portrait of her.”
Another portrait features a real-life
New Mexican mountain man, who Leffel’s
second wife, artist Sherrie McGraw, met
and invited to sit for a portrait. “When
the first sitting was done, we asked him
to please wear the same costume, and he
responded that it wasn’t a costume, it was
his clothes. He would hunt an animal, skin
the animal and then make his own clothes
from the hide of the animal,” Leffel says.
The mountain man had even made the
staff he is posing with in the painting.
“His face and everything about him were
so intriguing to capture.”
When painting still lifes, Leffel chooses
to paint items that have a timeless quality
to them. “Aside from the fruit, I paint
objects that are coated with the patina of
time. Objects that have some character to
them, in some fashion,” he says.
The objects featured have been collected
through a variety of means. His wife
Sherrie’s sister once owned an antique
shop in Oklahoma and sent on objects she
thought were fascinating, while dealers in
New York supplied him with Persian vases
or T’ang horses. “I knew a dealer in New
York who had authentic Chinese T’ang
horses, and I couldn’t afford to buy all of
them, so he would lend me one and once
I finished the painting, I would give it back
to him and exchange it for another piece,”
he remembers.
No matter how unique the subjects of
Leffel’s still lifes are, the main attraction is
still the way the light interacts with them
on the canvas. “I think of it as abstract
realism,” he says. “You may look at the
painting and the objects are identifiable,
but you’re painting more than the objects.
You’re painting light moving, color
moving or just movement itself, which in
turn creates timelessness.”
His painting Landscape with Apricots
was envisioned to convey a feeling of space.
“When I first started painting, the vase
was bigger than in the final painting, and
it didn’t have the vastness that I wanted to
convey, which is why I called it a landscape
rather than a still life,” he says. “So I wiped
it down and made the vase smaller to give
a feeling of emptiness.” The background
features a piece of antique wood sent to
him by his wife’s sister, which adds even
more depth and texture to the painting.
Mexican Ceramic with Red Lanterns
is a companion piece to Landscape with
Apricots, aiming to portray a similarfeeling of vastness and space. Leffel says,
“Because it was for the Prix de West show
in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, I chose to
make the ceramic and red lanterns the focal
point, whereas in the other painting I made
the space more of the focal point.”
A selection of Leffel’s best lifetime
works will be featured in a solo exhibi-
tion at InSight Gallery in Fredericksburg,
Texas, which opens November 5 and
remains on view through November 26.Erin E. Rand is a former editor of American
Art Collector, Western Art Collector,
Native American Art and American Fine
Art Magazine. She received her MA in
Publishing and Writing from Emerson
College, where she was a founding editor
of MinervaMag.com, and she has a BA in
History and International Affairs from
Trinity University. She currently resides in
Kansas City, Missouri.PASSION FOR LIGHT:
DAVID A. LEFFEL
When: November 5-26, 2021
Where: InSight Gallery, 214 W. Main Street,
Fredericksburg, TX
Information: (830) 997-9920, http://www.insightgallery.comMountain Man, oil, 28 x 23" Girl in Black Turtleneck, oil, 12 x 10"